I pulled shadow magic into my damaged knee, and let the power flutter around the katana blade I leaned upon. “Let’s rock indeed.”
I felt the thread of destiny through all recent events. This wasn’t about a haunted school and a TV show, or about ghosts, snakes, revenants, or poisoned cock. All those things had brought me to a turning point, where I’d face down a goddess, level up, and prove to all unseen powers in the cosmos that I was worthy to join them. My future empire grew from this point in time. My past was prologue, and those pages had turned.
And then Kaliya walked into the kitchen like a gift from heaven. Either he was hungry, or he had business with me. Either way, he didn’t expect to see me up and around—and armed for battle. His eyes widened. He stopped on a metaphorical dime, then seized his sheath, scraping out his scimitar. A smile twitched his lips.
He said, “Escaping? I don’t think so.”
“Midnight snack?” I made like Edgar Allen Poe’s raven. “Never more.”
And then we were lunging toward one another. I swung first, bringing my demon sword down in a diagonal slash. As I expected, he swung his sword up to block. My sword laughed, its voice pealing in my head. The black blade sliced through the scimitar like it was papier-mâché. I cut his sword in half and my blade went down across his chest. And his chest really was ebony. Blood didn’t spurt out. This guy was some kind of homunculus, the snake-goddess’ version of Pinocchio. Chopping him felt like a normal sword cutting through soft metal.
But all I needed was to touch him with the demon blade, letting its red aura wash into him. He staggered back, choking on terror as his yellow-green soul was torn out of his body, draining into my sword.
Hmmmm. Good, my sword said.
The stolen soul continued to scream, one of many voices forever trapped in the black sword. I staggered a step, regaining my balance as the sword shared fresh energy, letting a share of its power backwash into me. The demonic sword made me a second-hand vampire. Another edge I’d soon need.
“There are more to kill. I hope you’re up to it.”
More, more, more…
I jumped and fluttered wings, shooting over the dead homunculus. I banked to turn the corner he’d come around. A ramp forced me upward. I found myself on the backside of the larger dais with the nagi women nestled in their cushions, under seas of brightly hued silk. They slept. Their tits rose in unison, their breathing synchronized.
Weird, my inner dragon said.
“Weird dimension,” I muttered.
I beat my wings in the gloom, banking toward the smaller dais with the lotus throne. The throne was empty. The goddess was gone. I wondered if she’d retreated to private chambers, or had left the ziggurat. Maybe if I killed everyone here, she’d come running back.
Good plan, my sword said.
Hell, yeah, my dragon-self agreed.
Fuck ‘em all, my cock said.
That last one wasn’t quite with the program but I liked the enthusiasm.
I continued the banking curve, gliding toward the women’s dais again. Back-winging, I hovered a dozen feet above the sleepers, taking aim with my PX4 Storm. I locked onto one head and squeezed off two shots, moving to the next target, then the next... Muzzle flashes strobed the gloom. Hot brass casings flipped from my gun and tumbled to the ground. With the first few shots, the woman were jolted awake. They screamed, they died, and struggled up from their bedding, balancing on their tails. The head-shot nagi were up too, swaying, bleeding, and looking like nagi zombies.
Something strange is going on. The other two I killed away from here died and stayed that way. How are these different?
Those I’d shot were shaking it off, healing their cratered faces. Seeking me out, they hissed in fury and bared fangs. They rose higher. And higher. And then I saw all their tails were joined into a common body that went down underneath the dais. More of that body appeared and I found myself facing a nagi hydra.
Okay, I can’t take the nagi heads; I have to take each nagi off a hydra neck. Or maybe kill the common body.
I let go of my Storm PX4. It vanished, returning to my armory for reloading. Winging among the women, I slashed with the demon sword, and kicked with the katana on my leg. The nagi reflexively put up their arms. As a defense, it sucked. I chopped the arms off. Blood spurted. Limbs spun to the ground.
Crocodiles were wandering over, helping themselves to the tasty morsels. Gaging on the acid blood, rolling belly-up in death. Oh, well…
Going at their waists, I managed to sever two of the women from their hydra necks. The necks spurted a kind of black blood that splattered the cushions and silks, burning them, thickening the air with acrid fumes.
A thrill coursed through me when I saw the hydra necks didn’t grow anything back. Encouraged, I continued to dodge and flutter, slashing with the demon sword.
I’m not getting anything, the sword complained.
The nagi women don’t have souls, my dragon observed. It’s the hydra down there that has that quality.
As the last nagi woman was severed at her trunk, falling away, I dropped to the floor and used my foot katana to stab a crocodile in the throat. It backed off and flopped away, discouraged. Other crocodiles chomped on the dead crocs, and started eating their own.
You guys owe me, I thought.
I stood on the dais near where the hydra’s trunk emerged. Using my dragon hearing, I located its true heart. I leaped and stabbed with the demon sword. The blade went in to the hilt. The red aura seared the scaled skin. The glow grew ever brighter.
The sword screamed in ecstasy. So. Much. Power!
The hydra trunk thrashed wildly. I let go of the sword, leaving it to feed, and climbed higher, darting toward the very high ceiling. Hovering, the light went from red to pink, then pink with a white core. A nebulous haze of plasma roiled below, consuming the hydra. It burned to ash in a slow erosion fed by its own death. The hydra had held at least seven demi-souls. The hydra’s body might have held an eighth.
All that immortal lifeforce was a hell of a lot to hold onto, but the sword was determined. I’d starved it in a dead universe of endless darkness and sub-zero cold. I’d left it there for months, threatening never to come back. I’d taught it hunger and desperation. And most of all, fear of dissolution. This might be too much power to handle, but the damaged soul of the sword was going to try.
Strands of spider silk drew my attention to the ceiling. Ragged blotches of the stuff dangled close overhead. And in those light-washed sheets, albino long-legs walked over one another, running here and there. These weren’t as monstrously huge as the one I’d seen atop the ziggurat outside, but they were bigger than me, and venomous.
They eyed me with multiple eyes and some moved closer. I pulled two Px4 Storms out of the ether and opened fire. And still they came.
I called my sword to me, knowing I couldn’t hang around any longer. The sword streaked to me in a haze of crimson energy, turning in its flight to offer itself hilt first. I grabbed the hilt and knew at once I’d made a horrible mistake. I screamed as the sword dumped excess power into our vampiric link. Into me. So glad to be useful. I glowed from the inside out, my raw magic swelling like a golden nova. Lightning crackled, wreathing my arms, my torso, and legs.
Sensibly, the spiders ran away. Vibrating wasn’t going to help.
1
THIRTY-EIGHT
“Bringing down the house isn’t just a song.”
—Caine Deathwalker
My dragon wings beat stridently. I rose, a hot knife through butter, the savage song of my power clearing the way as I lifted my demon sword and—like He-Man on crack—let myself go. Well, let my power go, actually. Holding it in would have popped me like a balloon.
Yellow jags of lightning braided and unbraided, zagging in all directions, burning the webs and the too-slow spiders. Rock chunks hailed as the firestorm dug into the ziggurat. Whole block of stone fell past me.
My skin glowed gold. Motes of gold, like fa
iry lights, flurried around me. In counterpoint, thin curls of red lightning snarled and lashed around the sword, the scribbles bleeding off its demon aura.
Tier after tier cleared like smoke until I hung above the white-washed ziggurat, watching it crumble and implode. Dust billowed. Falling blocks thundered. A pack of komodo dragons on the ground stampeded.
And still the power filled me, screaming for release. The black sky alone—distant and aloof—remained untouched.
Padma rose on a scream of wind, coming out of the dust. Her face was tight, her eyes alight with a yellow-green flame. Her black hair uncurled and writhed, giving her a medusa look. The ruby on her chain tiara glowed with multiple beams stabbing out, spinning wildly. Her hands were reduced to shadows at the core of yellow-green balls of light as she summon her power to strike. From the waist down, her snake body rippled, wagging, snapping with frenzy.
The serene all-powerful facet of her personality had gone into storage. This was pissed.
“Hold all the power you have and get ready,” I told my sword. “This is a goddess.”
A what?
I took my own advice, closing down the firestorm flowing through me, creating a bottleneck, then corking it. My chakra points formed a constellation of golden stars within my body. A river of power connected them. My skin glowed gold, throwing up shadows where my tattoos were. The ink itself—having been mixed with dragon blood and dragon magic—burned like they did when first needled into my flesh. With my guts crawling with energy, my lungs breathing it, there was no need to hold back. I warmed every tattoo with raw magic.
Pain winged in and kissed me hard. She bit my tongue and spilled acid down my throat while kneeing my balls. Yeah, happy to see you too. Pain hugged me, and I thought my ribs were going to grind into powder. Then she was gone.
And I only had Padma to deal with. Crazed beyond belief, she had enough restraint to look at the changes in me and not rush in blindly. From the dour frown on her face, I don’t think she liked what she saw. The ruby on her tiara toned down its fire, and her serene mask returned with just a hint of sternness to it; a you’ve-made-mommy-angry look. A half-smile curled the right side of her lips. They parted. Fangs flashed as she spoke.
“You have surprised me, little warrior. I didn’t know you had such fight in you.”
Little? Why the fuck does everyone have to go there? I gave her smile, letting my battle mask slide into place. You are going to pay for that.
“She said, “You surprised me in another way.” Dramatic pause. “Surprisingly tasty. You were delicious.”
My smile widened. I smelled weakness. Instead of bludgeoning me flat with limitless power, she sought an advantage by throwing me off stride, making me angry. She was less confident. Maybe the demon aura of my sword, my raised power level, gave her pause. Or maybe the ruined ziggurat under us.
“You got another surprise coming,” I said. “I can regrow my leg. Can you regrow a soul once I fuck you with my sword? I bet it will find you tasty.”
Her smile grew.
Bingo. Direct hit on your worse fear.
She’s going to hit us now, my dragon said.
I know.
She lifted both shadow hands, palms outward toward me. Yellow-green light still wreathed them. Matching lightning arced from ball to ball. She gritted her teeth in a snarl and a wall of power shivered into being between us. It touched the ground and raked the bottom of the sky. From the amount of distortion in the transparency, I thought it about four-foot deep.
Her hands made a pushing gesture. The wall came at me like a freight train.
Shadow magic: a shell of shadow swelled out from the katana leg. The darkness wrapped me. Her barrier passed around mine without touching me, leaving me inside her guard. My wings beat furiously, driving my lunge.
Her eyes widened.
Coming in, I kicked at her face with the katana.
The green-yellow ball of light around her left hand left a colored blur in the air as she blocked my stab. I had her flying backward, seeking distance. I had momentum. I had a PX4 Storm semi-automatic in my fist, spitting fire and mf-tipped bullets into her face. Her head jerked in response, though I don’t think she knew about guns and bullets. She learned as the side of her head exploded.
The crater filled in, bone and muscle regenerating, the flesh closing without a scar. She was unhurt again, but there were seeds of darkness and fear in her soul. A lesser creature had hurt her, teaching her pain.
My smile widened. Confidence is power. Doubt is weakness. Death itself was now possible for a goddess. Her knowing that made it real in her universe, another card in the deck.
I fired until my magazine ran empty and let go of the gun, sending it a universe away for reloading. The gun had done its work and become useless; she’d sheathed her body with the green-yellow radiance of her soul, making transparent armor.
But what does a goddess really know about armor. I’d forged my own before. I’d studied metallurgy. I knew about folding steel, carbon steel, meteoric iron, and all the complexities of design and range of motion.
She just knew she needed some. What she made had stopped my later shots, but she’d have been better off with a shield, depending on mobility. She moved well enough dodging my demon sword’s point. The strength and stamina of a goddess is extreme. But she lacked martial arts training.
My skills were getting me closer.
Her evasions grew more desperate.
I knew the moment she fell back on raw destructive power—I saw it in her expression. And that was the moment I struck, lunging in with my sword while draining it of every soul it had ever drained. The spirits screamed in my head.
My sword complained: Give those back, they’re mine.
I need the power, I thought back at him. And you need to be empty if you intend to capture the soul of a goddess.
The concept of eating divinity stunned the blade into silent awe, followed by a backwash of greedy hunger I felt in my bones.
The demon sword’s tip pressed in above her heart. Red fire sputtered and sparked at the contact point. All-the-while, torrents of chartreuse energy seared the air, pounding across my body, jarring internal organs, cracking bones, burning skin.
My raw magic and the last energy of the hydra bled from pores, limiting the damage I took, keeping me in place, but that power had limits. Fortunately, there were no limits on my cunning. The red glow of the sword began to gutter out, as I knew it would.
This failure encouraged Padma to slow her retreat and stop, holding her piece of sky. She laughed, never slacking the river of power chipping away at me.
I sent my thoughts to the katana that held so much of my shadow magic. The silk rope parted, ripped away, and the katana flew with no hand on the hilt. It stabbed in point first, its point merging with that of the demon sword. Neither sword could have pierced her armor of light, not separately, but combined, my shadow magic eating the light with shadow, the demon sword went in. And once the hole was made, the rest of the blade followed. I pushed the demon sword all the way through her body, piercing heart and spine.
She breathed a word, “No.”
I pulled back the katana, its work finished, and leaned into her, my face inches from hers. “You ate my leg, whore. I’ve paid for the privilege of fucking you. You don’t get to say no.”
Her arms and legs dangled, useless, unable to respond to her brain. The power she might have used to heal herself drained into the vampire sword, a reservoir of power, awful, near endless, hard currents of it fighting to be free. My sword screamed in orgasmic release that went lightyears past pleasure into a hell of pain. But it wanted that pain, that fullness, the flavor of a goddess’ soul. It craved the ultimate feasting and I gave it, even when that power started to backwash into me, carving blood grooves in my spirit.
I channeled that power into my bad knee. The power of a goddess made the cells grow. Bone grew back, blood vessels, muscles, tendons, ligaments… These stretched down and hook
ed, a new ankle forming, then the missing foot. I healed myself and still the excess power poured in.
Her eyes, lit with baleful energy, focused on my face. Her glare became a double pronged assault of death rays. Like emerald lasers, her stare burned out my eyes, bringing blindness.
But my sword continued to feed on her energy, shoving much of it my way in gratitude for the meal.
My smile remained. I couldn’t doubt. I couldn’t waver, or her power would escape my control. My eyes rebuilt themselves, healing, regenerating as fast as she destroyed the tissue. There were flashes of light and darkness fed along my optic nerves to my brain. My eyebrows burned away. And my hair. My face felt sunburned, and then caught fire.
If she hadn’t taught me real pain, I might have panicked and given in to survival instincts. To the death, I swore. I will not leave you alive. It’s bad enough I’m going to dream of this moment for years to come, waking up from sleep with a scream on my lips.
“Is that all you’ve got?” I gritted out.
I had more. I had the shadow-wrapped katana in my left hand. I didn’t need to see to use it. I flicked the tip at her crotch just above where the armor ended. The shadow magic eat into the armor. Swatting her pussy made her flinch.
“Feel a breeze?” I asked. “Do you know what I’m going to do to your corpse before it cools down?”
She gasped at the idea. Being a goddess, she had to know I wasn’t joking.
Yeah, I’d fuck that, my cock said.
I feigned with the tip.
She gasped again. Maybe she’d heard that voice in my head.
We reached a point where her soul waned, expended in combat, drained by the demon sword. Her eye-beams went ragged, then failed altogether. I knew this because my eyes finally finished rebuilding themselves. The power in me fixed my face and hair, and it was still too much to hold.
The demon sword wasn’t doing much better. The black-iron blade had deepened until his darkness hinted at compressed layers of space-time continuum. His red glow was gone, becoming a muddy violent. The aura had tripled in density and had acquired an erratic pulse, as if beating to its own heart as well as mine.
Demon Lord 6: Garnet Tongue Goddess Page 28
